Who wrote this? "Let's ask the unionists a couple of questions in this hypothetical dream-world where loyalties are exchangeable. Why stay attached to a country which certainly doesn't love you, which is governed by men and women with no abiding principle other than the acquisition and retention of the levers of power, where intrusive bossiness has taken the place of social policy, where words are spun as webs are woven, covering all meaning with a gossamer sheen of vacuity?
"Come and live with us in an Ireland where we get an awful lot wrong; but it is a better place to be than a United Kingdom which regards you as a historic encumbrance. Our Government is not perfect, but it's not at all bad, and it's led by an honest man. Moreover, we have a splendid head of state, one you'll come to respect and admire. . .
Accommodate traditions
"You think we can't accommodate you and your traditions? Really? You might just try us. This is the deal. You can fly what flags you want, march in July, remember your war dead - why, we'll even join you - keep your British passports, and retain your loyalty to the Queen. Most important of all, you can hunt foxes. And when she visits - which I suspect will be rather often - so can she.
"What do you say?"
Which Fianna Fail hack wrote such an intellectually contemptible, politically meaningless load of tripe? Was it Martin Mansergh? Was it a Lenihan? Was it one of the Andrews misters? Go on: who was it?
It was me, actually, last December (he said, polishing his nails). And I say this only as evidence that most people have complicated views about complicated matters, such as the question of Irish unity. Do I say X because my heart tells me to, and I find intellectual justification for it? Or vice versa? Or is there an indistinguishable mixture of the two?
Many Irish nationalist ideologists are as tolerant of people questioning the validity of the "national question" as John Charles McQuaid would have been of a curate questioning priestly celibacy from the pulpit: no ifs, whys, maybes, or buts. The nationalist agenda, declared by force of arms in 1916, and followed by different means by different parties ever since, is the one revealed political religion, and those who question it are heretics, to be banished from the communion of saints.
It's not always Irish nationalists who say such things. The English liberal-left, in a classically colonial way, feels free to lecture the Irish on how best to order their affairs, on lines appropriate to the English liberal-left agenda. Now it's possible David Wheatley, of Hull University, is in fact Irish - in which case, my heart goes out to him, marooned in Hull, poor fellow: no wonder he's talking through his bottom.
"Torch-bearers"
So if he's an English lefty-liberal, unsurprisingly, this is what he thinks, and if he's Irish, this is what his bottom says in the Dublin Review recently: "In a perverse way it is not [Declan] Kiberd, but commentators of another stripe entirely, like Ruth Dudley Edwards, Kevin Myers and Eoghan Harris who are the true torch-bearers for oldstyle nationalism today: no one else can take its legacy quite as personally as an overcompensating southern unionist, or make it seem as monstrously omnipresent in Irish society."
This is what the debate has come to. The three of us, only two of us in the Republic, against the massed opinion of virtually all other columnists, are spoken of as if we were a deadly typus bacillus threatening the body politic of Irish nationalism. We are dismissively and repeatedly referred to as "unionists" by such as the Hull Kingston Rover and by Tim Pat Coogan, whose spite daily grows apace. Their intellectual insecurity must be crippling.
Let other people speak for themselves: but are the opening words of this column of last December a statement of unionism? Or do they represent just one voice from a mind that, like most people's, has many thoughts, and which tries to consider different alternative solutions to the same enduring problem? And is this too complex a notion for those who are so free with the "unionist" epithets?
I have said a thousand times that I am a Redmondite. Now that fool in Grimsby or wherever might think that is the same thing as being a unionist. To judge from T.P. Coogan's vile and disgraceful observations about me some time ago, that is tantamount to being a member of MI6.
Political violence
I believe this: there were no circumstances in Ireland which justified the use of political violence, and the taking of living, breathing, human life either in 1916, or ever subsequently. John Redmond sought a peaceful, constitutional, negotiated, amiable and mutually respectful separation of nationalist Ireland from Britain. He did not understand the full vigour of Ulster Unionism - but he was aware that it needed to be wooed, not battered. The many Irish republican projects have not been peaceful, constitutional, amiable, or respectful. They have not sought to woo, but to batter. Not merely have they been ethically wrong, but they have been abject failures too.
I am not a unionist, but I have this in common with unionism: I despise Irish republicanism, politically and morally. And I would infinitely rather be wrongly called an Irish unionist than correctly called an Irish republican. In that regard only, the gentleman in Cleethorpes is nearly right.